Video Game / Mizzurna Falls

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Mizzurna Falls is a Japan-Only Mystery Horror Adventure Game by Human Entertainment. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Spiritual Adaptation of Twin Peaks, albeit with markedly less surrealism. The game is also notable for being one of the first Wide-Open Sandbox games ever made. It was released for the PlayStation on December 23rd, 1998.

On Christmas Day, 1998, at 6:13 AM, a young girl named Kathy Flannery is found unconscious and injured near the outskirts of her hometown, Mizzurna Falls, which is located in Colorado near the Rocky Mountains. If that weren't enough, another young girl, Emma Rowland, has gone missing during the night. The local police quickly comes to the conclusion that the two incidents might somehow be related.

The same morning, the local teenage boy named Matthew Williams is phoned and informed of these developments by Sheriff Morgan, as he had previously been in a relationship with Emma, and he might have been the last person to have seen the her alive. This piques Matthew's interest in the case, and he decides to try his hand at playing an Amateur Sleuth and look into what's going on. Over the course of his investigation, he ends up making several startling discoveries about his small town.

In 2010, the game got somewhat of a Spiritual Successor, in the shape of Deadly Premonition, which is also overtly inspired by Twin Peaks (though where Mizzurna Falls downplays Twin Peaks's surrealistic and supernatural elements, Deadly Premonition embrace them wholeheartedly).

As of March 31, 2021, a full English Fan Translation of the game was released.

Mizzurna Falls contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: It turns out that Father Barton was responsible for the marks on Kathy's neck, as he tried strangling her for defying his will.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: A Downplayed example. While the game is primarily heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, the whole subplot surrounding the nightclub singer, Isabella, is at least partially inspired by another famous David Lynch work, namely Blue Velvet. Isabella even shares her first name with Isabella Rossellini, the actress who played the role she is an Expy of. Matthew, meanwhile, also seem to borrow some of Jeffrey Beaumont's character, being a pretty ordinary teenager who decides to play at being an Amateur Sleuth and stumbles over a greater criminal conspiracy in his hometown as a result.
• Bald of Evil: The local notorious criminal known as "Bonehead" probably got his nickname due to being bald. He even combines it with a (somewhat downplayed) Beard of Evil, as he also sports a small soul patch.
• Composite Character:
  • Matthew is primarily based on James Hurley, mostly in how he had a close relationship with the two missing girls, mirroring how James was close with both Laura and Donna, and decides to investigate the case based on this, much in the same way James and Donna team up to get to the bottom of Laura's murder. Interestingly though, Matthew also draws quite a bit on, not another Twin Peaks character, but a character from another prominent Lynch work, namely Jeffrey Beaumont of Blue Velvet; much like Jeffrey, Matthew's attempt at playing an Amateur Sleuth leads him to discover a criminal conspiracy in his home town, which involves a drug trade, a local crime lord, and an attractive, but troubled nightclub singer.
  • The local psychiatrist James is by all appearances a somewhat odd combination between Twin Peak's eccentric psychologist, Dr. Jacoby, and the straight-laced and serious Deputy Hawk. He has Jacoby's background of being a psychologist and having been giving Emma, the game's stand-in for Laura Palmer, mental health counseling in secret, while he has Hawk's generally serious demeanor, and being an expert on Native American folklore and spirituality. And when revealed as the true Big Bad, he even turns out to also have quite a bit of Windom Earle in him, being a Diabolical Mastermind hiding behind a Mask of Sanity and whose goal is to use an arcane ritual to give himself ultimate power.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Sheriff Morgan is clearly modelled after Reginald VelJohnson in his role as Al Powell in Die Hard.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In the Backstory, the man who killed Barbara's little sister eventually shot himself.
  • If Matthew uncovers how Father Barton strangled his daughter, they briefly hold him hostage while ranting about how they shouldn't be blamed for their actions, as they were "following God's will". They then shoot themselves in the head.
• Driving Question: What happened to Emma on December 25?
• Expy: Quite a few characters are openly inspired by characters from Twin Peaks. Emma is perhaps the most obvious one, as a stand-in for Laura Palmer; she was noted to live a double, kept a secret dairy, and her mother's name is Sarah.
• Good Morning, Crono: The game starts with Matthew being woken up by his phone ringing.
• Government Conspiracy: In the past, the military took an interest in the Death Journey Ritual, resulting in the creation of "Project Mizzurna", where they attempted to replicate the ritual. Most of the test subjects naturally died as a result, but not all.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The plot starts on Christmas Day, and Matthew has one game in-week to get to the bottom of the mystery, meaning that the climax of the game is set to happen on New Year's Eve.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Bad Ending has Matthew lamenting if only he could go back in time and do things differently, nudging at the game's intended design of playing through multiple times to learn what you should do.
• Made of Iron:
  • In the shooting Quick Time Events, your targets can take a LOT of punishment. And bullets.
  • In one case, the shooting minigame is followed by a fistfight with the very same person you just pumped full of lead. Supposedly, they were able to endure all that since they were hopped up on Epoch.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Unlike Twin Peaks, which had explicitly supernatural events overlaying the entire ordeal, Mizzurna Falls is more ambiguous as to whether or not the events involve actual supernatural phenomena, or whether they're simply myths that certain people believe in which influences their actions. In that sense it has more in common with the 1st season of True Detective.
• Multiple Endings: The game has several depending on what you did, and if you managed to solve the mysteries of what happened to Kathy and Emma. If you get a Bad Ending, the game tells you to go back and try again. In general, the ending is determined by 1) whether or not you managed to figure out what's going on by the end of the year, and 2) whether or not you managed to find enough evidence to deduce who the real Big Bad is (Matthew doesn't actually put the pieces together himself if you do, but the ending still changes so you end up confronting the Big Bad instead of being ambushed by them).
• Mutual Kill: The good ending has Matthew and the Big Bad shooting each other at the same time during their confrontation, with the game ending as Matthew lays dying in the snow. However, during the credits it shows Matthew in the hospital making a recovery.
• Present Day: The game was released on December 23, 1998, and the plot of the game kicks off on December 25, 1998.
• The Place: The game is named after the town it's set in.
• The Rival: Throughout the game Matthew repeatedly comes into conflict with Mel, a local high school "bad boy" with ties to a criminal gang who seem to be at the core of what happened to Emma.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Mel is the son of Dennis, the richest man in Mizzurna Falls.
• The Sheriff: Morgan is sheriff of Mizzurna Falls.
• Timed Mission: Matthew is given seven in-game days to get to the bottom of whatever happened to Kathy and Emma.
• Twisted Christmas: The terrible thing that befell Kathy and Emma took place during the transition between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and Matthew and the player is given an in-game week to solve the case, meaning that the game wraps up on New Year's Day.